• Valton Costa, Kevin Pacheco-Barrios, Anna Carolyna Gianlorenço, and Felipe Fregni.
• Laboratory of Neurosciences and Neurological Rehabilitation, Physical Therapy Department, Federal University of Sao Carlos, Sao Carlos, SP, Brazil.
• Pain Med. 2024 Jul 4.

ObjectiveTo explore the relationship between sociodemographic, clinical, and neurophysiological variables and health-related quality of life (HR-QOL) of patients with phantom limb pain.MethodsThis is a cross-sectional analysis of a previous clinical trial. Univariate and multivariate linear and logistic regression analyses were used to model the predictors of HR-QOL. We utilized a sequential modeling approach with increasing adjustment levels, controlling for age and sex, and other relevant clinical variables (time since amputation, level of amputation, and pain). HR-QOL was assessed by the SF-36 Health Survey and its eight subdomains.ResultsWe analyzed baseline data from 92 patients with lower-limb amputations. They were mostly male (63%), 45.2 ± 15.6 years, with a mean time since amputation of 82.7 ± 122.4 months, and an overall SF-36 score of 55.9 ± 21.5. We found an association between intracortical facilitation in the affected hemisphere (ICF), gabapentin usage, and HR-QOL. ICF is a predictor of better HRQOL, whereas gabapentin usage was associated with a poorer HR-QOL, with the main model explaining 13.4% of the variance in the outcome. For the SF-36 subdomains, ICF was also a positive predictor for social functioning, bodily pain, and vitality, while medication usage was associated with lower scores in mental health, general health perception, bodily pain, and vitality.ConclusionWe found firsthand two new independent predictors of HR-QOL in individuals with PLP, namely, the neurophysiological metric ICF and gabapentin usage. These results highlight the role of the motor cortex excitability in the HR-QOL and stress the need for treatments that favor the neuroplastic adaptation after amputation, for which ICF may be used as a possible marker.© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Academy of Pain Medicine. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

4 keywords...

hide…